The growing tolerance for lawbreaking

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators News Service.. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.

America was founded as a nation under the law. But, if you watch the headlines closely, these days, you can see a growing trend of official contempt for the Constitution, Congress and the will of the people.

What am I talking about? Let’s just look at the last few days.

We learned late last week from Insight magazine that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg apparently violated a federal law 21 times since 1995 by participating

in cases involving companies in which her husband owned stock. This used to be known as conflict of interest — not just in Supreme Court cases but in state courts and even municipal courts. But, surprisingly, it took some enterprising reporting by a conservative magazine to bring this home to the Ginsburgs.

“Until reading the Insight article I had not appreciated that stocks … raised the concern Insight has highlighted,” said Martin Ginsburg. He said he ordered his broker to sell all his stock in eight companies involved in the cases. That should settle the matter, because the establishment press is scarcely interested in the story. Why? Because the justice in question wasn’t Clarence Thomas, perhaps. Or Antonin Scalia. Or William Rehnquist.

The same day the Insight story broke, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that she was suspending the deportation of tens of thousands of illegal aliens — even though legislation passed by Congress just last year requires her to give them the boot. Instead, Reno said, she will be writing legislation that would give these 160,000 illegals yet another chance to avoid deportation on humanitarian grounds.

Do you realize how many chances illegal aliens get right now before facing deportation? It’s amazing. No other country in the world has such tolerance for violations of its laws and its borders. And, remember, this nation takes in more legal immigrants than every other country in the world combined. But that’s not enough for Reno, who has placed herself above the will of Congress, above the will of the people and above the law in making this outrageous determination. Once again, though, she will probably get her way, because the establishment press doesn’t see things that way. You could tell from the tone of the few stories on this issue that the media elite believe Reno’s right — just as she was when she executed those mothers and children at Waco.

But the piece de resistance when it comes to flouting the law can be seen in the continuing investigation of campaign financing violations.

This week the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Fred Thompson, will hear from CIA official John Dickerson, who says Democratic fund-raiser John Huang, hand-picked for his job first in the Commerce Department and later at the Democratic National Committee by President Clinton, expressed peculiar interest in getting secret intelligence reports about Communist China.

Huang later funneled Chinese government money directly into President Clinton’s re-election campaign.

There was a time in this country when such actions would be investigated, not as campaign finance violations, but as high treason. But those were less tolerant times, I guess. The press, for the most part, doesn’t even see this as front-page news. C-SPAN, once the great hope of those pushing for a more open, informed society, is blacking out live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the hearings. CNN is taking a walk, too, though, given its ownership, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Unlike the Iran-Contra hearings or Watergate, if you want to see this spectacle, you’d better get a satellite dish or be prepared to stay up late for the C-SPAN taped coverage. To justify this media malfeasance, the apologists cite polls showing the public doesn’t care — that the president is riding record high approval ratings. Of course, that never stopped anyone from covering other scandals during the Reagan and Bush administrations, even though both of those presidents had much high approval ratings than Clinton.

Do you see the double-standard? I hope so. It’s one so big you could sail the Queen Mary through it.

But the point of all this is that the American people are being deliberately dumbed down and conditioned to accept a society our parents and grandparents would hardly recognize — one in which the law takes a backseat to political expediency and opportunism.